Vision vs. Perspective Shoot-Out

Oct 12

Now that Inductive Automation’s Ignition Perspective module has been around for a few years, many people are asking “What about Vision?”. Back in 2021, at the ICC, many people had questions concerning how long IA planned to maintain and develop Vision moving forward. Of course there were also questions about when to use Vision or Perspective.

Corso Systems has had many years of experience developing with Ignition using the Vision module, and since we’ve worked with Perspective ever since the beta was released, we have observations and opinions to share. For many use cases, you can actually choose Vision or Perspective and what you are most comfortable working with will be a great choice. For certain situations you may want to use Vision, and for others you will want Perspective. Additionally, there are some use cases where you may want to use a combination of both modules.

Below are common example use cases for Vision, Perspective, or both modules together. We hope these real-world applications will help your decide which module(s) to include in your project. If you need help with your Ignition project, or wish to learn about our automatic conversion tool, please be sure to book a short, no-pressure meeting with Cody Johnson in sales.

To earn more about how Corso Systems can convert your Vision windows to Perspective Views, please read our recent post - Ignition: Vision to Perspective Conversions

Mobile Application Development

Perspective is the clear winner for mobile applications. It has a native mobile app on the Apple and Android app stores, and full support for browser-based access with HTML5. On the other hand, Vision offers a mobile module for Vision which provides browser-based access and mobile device access to a Java-based client on the gateway machine. The mobile module for Vision requires additional computing resources on the gateway, but provide vision clients in a browser without requiring additional development. If you want a great mobile experience, we recommend Perspective over Vision. However if you were on 7.8 or 7.9, you can still get mobile without having to develop in Perspective. Need to convert Vision to Perspective? We have an automated tool and a rapid conversion process to get you on your way!

Winner: Perspective

Redundant/Mission Critical Architecture

If you are using the standard redundant gateway setup with a main and back up Gateway, either Perspective or Vision will work for you. If you need mission critical architecture with local client fall back, you'll need to use Vision for your clients as this isn’t part of the Perspective architecture. You could use backend architecture and infrastructure like load balancing to get around this in Perspective, however this would require additional IT infrastructure and support. So, for redundant architecture requiring mission critical availability, we give Vision the win.

Winner: Vision for truly robust architecture, tie for standard redundancy.

Server Architecture

Vision allows your clients to handle scripting and local CPU resources instead of server resources to run your clients. On the other hand, Perspective runs on the gateway, and the gateway performs all of the processing—and provides the clients with an HTML5 page for the browsers to render.

Vision projects can run on a server with less resources than a similar number of Perspective clients with the same performance. That said, you can run Ignition on essentially any computer, so you may not run into any performance issues unless you are running a very large system with many dozens or hundreds of clients open at a time.

There may be other considerations depending on where your servers are located—either on-premises or in the cloud—in terms of bandwidth and network usage, but we think Vision and Perspective are roughly equivalent requirements-wise for most users. We would not necessarily choose a platform based on server specifications alone.

Winner: Tie.

File System Interactions

Perspective runs on the gateway, so in cases where Ignition needs to interact with local files on client machines we generally recommend Vision as Perspective has additional hurdles involved to access data on the client machine.

In some organizations ignition has already gotten approval from IT and may allow you to do things on client machines that would require additional approvals to do using additional software. In these instances using Vision to interact with local client machines may be preferable to an additional third-party solution.

Winner: If you need to interact with local files Vision, if not, Tie.

Familiarity

As with any technology, we can't discount the benefit of familiarity with the platform as a decision making tool. We feel the benefits of Perspective are usually worth the effort to learn the platform for most users. However we understand that isn't always an option for our customers. If your developers are familiar with Vision now and you want to get a project off the ground quickly, it will make sense to use Vision in the short term with the potential to migrate to Perspective in the long term.

That said, Perspective offers responsive mobile capabilities. It is also possible to develop in Perspective using coordinate containers to give you a similar development environment to Vision, but with the added capabilities and benefits of Perspective.

Winner: Depends on what you are most comfortable with.

Wrapping Up

While there are benefits to Vision, Inductive Automation has made it clear over the past few ICC events that Perspective will receive the majority of new development efforts moving forward. This is not only because it is the “sexier” technology and addresses the needs of a lot of industry use cases. It is also a newer platform and requires more development resources to get it to where Vision is after being on the market for over a decade.

Vision isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and it is a perfectly capable SCADA solution. Perspective has come a long way in the last couple years, and is running some of the most complex manufacturing processes in the world.

While the answer is up to you, it is easy to weigh the pros and cons of each. At Corso Systems, we find a combination of Perspective and Vision is usually the best approach for many implementations. If you need what Vision can do well (ie: interacting with files on the client machines) we would build a client for those interactions, and layer in Perspective elsewhere.

With Ignition, you get as many clients as you need, so why not take advantage of all the tools at your disposal?